After the virtual isolation of the past weeks, Jennifer found the sudden bustle and activity strangely disorientating. The yard beyond the shielding-off, high-gated entrance was jammed with police cars and vans and men and woman in police and prison officer uniform. The escorting wardresses formed up either side and walked her into the building. Almost directly inside was a reception office, where her arrival was officially listed in a ledger and a clerk signed a receipt which Jennifer realized was for her, as if she was a product or a package. Still unspeaking they led her on, nodding and occasionally greeting other officers and prison staff as they passed.
The cell at which they stopped was half-tiled. In its centre there was a scarred table with a tin ashtray in its middle. There was a chair either side and two more against the wall, below the barred window. There was no bed or obvious toilet, but there was a pervading smell of urine. The wardress who had remained silent until now said, ‘Do you want to pee or anything? Once you’re in court you’ll be stuck, not able to go.’
‘I don’t think so. Thank you.’
‘It’s your last chance.’
‘No.’
‘If her brief hurries, we’ll be able to get a cup of tea before we have to go up,’ said the talkative wardress to the other. And then smiled as Jeremy Hall appeared at the door.
Hall was smiling, too. Humphrey Perry was directly behind. He was blank-faced.
‘The suit’s just right. Perfect.’
‘Good.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘OK.’ The excitement of no longer being incarcerated was ebbing away, back in yet another cell.
‘Not frightened?’ asked Hall.
Jennifer didn’t answer at once. ‘I’ve never been in a court before but no, I don’t think so.’
‘There’s quite a lot of ritual. Tradition. Don’t pay any attention to it. But you must leave everything to me. Not try to address the court yourself.’
‘I’ll do my best not to let anything happen. She’s doing something different. I know she’s with me but she’s not talking. Trying to upset me now by saying nothing. Just lurking.’
Perry, who’d brought up one of the spare chairs to sit beside the other lawyer, shifted but didn’t speak. His chair grated, jarringly.
‘How do you know she’s with you?’ asked Hall.
‘I won’t tell you, remember? She’ll know if I tell you. Maybe do something to stop me knowing.’ She wondered if that would get any reaction but there was no sound in her head.
Perry sighed.
Hall said, ‘I forgot. If you want to say anything to me you can do it through Mr Perry. Write a note or ask him to come up to the dock. That’s acceptable. For several days it’ll just be the prosecution evidence.’ And a lot more he didn’t want to contemplate, he thought, fearfully.
‘All right.’
‘We’ve done well with jury selection.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Ensured, as best we can, what might be the most favourable jury.’
Jennifer’s frown deepened. ‘I don’t understand?’
‘I challenged the men to the allowable limit and got them replaced by women.’ He regretted now making the comment at alclass="underline" the composition wouldn’t have meant anything to her if he hadn’t mentioned it.
‘More sympathetic to me about Rebecca, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s not part of my defence.’
‘It’s the key to the prosecution, which I’ve got to do everything to confront.’
‘Which I expect you to do very well.’
Hall half shrugged, looking around the bare room. ‘You can have food brought in during the trial, if you’d like. I don’t think what they provide here is much good.’
‘I’m not very interested in eating. Maybe I’ll think about it tomorrow. But thank you for the thought.’ It seemed a long time since anyone had treated her with any kindness or personal consideration. She realized how much she’d missed it. Suddenly she demanded, ‘Are you frightened?’
‘No,’ blinked Hall, startled. He was glad she hadn’t asked if he was apprehensive, which he didn’t consider the same thing, the most minimal element of fear and therefore hardly qualifying. And if she had he would have lied to retain her confidence. But he was apprehensive. Not of any one single danger but generally concerned, mostly about the unknown. Whatever happened it was going to be a parody of a proper trial until Jarvis intervened to stop it and Hall accepted he personally would be the object of every sort of criticism and outrage. And not only – just most immediately and directly – from Jarvis but at every other legal level. Realistically Jarvis’s influence disappeared with the old man’s retirement and Hall expected to retain his place in the Proudfoot chambers even after Sir Richard’s elevation because he was the man’s nephew. But it would be a long time, if ever, before a brief was offered to him by name. And even longer before Bert Feltham accepted one for him, named or not.
‘I’m glad you’re not frightened,’ said Jennifer. ‘And I appreciate what you’ve done for me.’
‘I haven’t done anything for you yet,’ Hall reminded.
‘What you’re going to do for me,’ Jennifer corrected.
‘I have to go and robe,’ said Hall, standing. ‘Do you want to make yourself comfortable before the court?’
‘No,’ refused Jennifer again. ‘And I want to apologize, for going on about a QC. I trust you.’
As they climbed the stairs to reach the robing room Perry said, ‘Yet another amazing transformation. The voice has mysteriously gone away and you’re the barrister she wants after all.’
‘She’ll change her mind soon enough when she sees how I’m going to let the trial go.’
‘What mind?’ dismissed the solicitor, allowing the contemptuous cynicism.
Hall shrugged but didn’t bother with a reply. He was taking the only defence course open to him with Jennifer Lomax but he couldn’t lose the feeling that he was in some way failing her.
Preoccupied as she was by space – or lack of it – Jennifer was surprised by the comparative smallness of the court. Her expected imagery came from films and television, invariably American, in which legal surroundings barely achieved their supposed officialdom from just the raised dais for the judge and the pen for the jury, but otherwise looked like church halls.
Where she was going to be tried didn’t look anything like a church hall and scarcely appeared half the size of one. Jeremy Hall’s word – tradition – came immediately into her still clear mind as Jennifer entered the dock and gazed around her, registering everything. The brass-railed dock that was to be her place for the duration of the trial dominated the floor of the court, only slightly lower in its elevated height to the carved, wood-canopied and Royal emblem-surmounted bench from which the judge would preside, from the huge and momentarily unoccupied red leather, button-backed throne.
In the well of the court, seemingly far below her, were the bewigged and raven-robed barristers – Jeremy Hall’s wig was far whiter, his robe far newer than any around him – with their instructing junior counsel and solicitors in battle-ready formation behind: surrounded by so many artificial headpieces, Humphrey Perry’s domed bald head stood out like a pebble in a stream. Facing them but directly below the judge’s position was the robed and wigged court clerk with other officials and to their left a bespectacled, grey-haired woman at a stenograph.
The press gallery was behind her and already full, a flurry and buzz of attention erupting the moment Jennifer’s head appeared above the rail. A girl in a jean suit and a bearded man at the very edge of the gallery immediately began sketching in large pads, heads jerking up and down like mechanical dolls as they tried to capture her likeness. The jury box was on the opposite side of the court to the press, tiered up on two levels. Remembering the downstairs cell conversation, she counted ten women and two men. They all concentrated upon her entry but with less noise than the press opposite. The public gallery was behind and above, far too high for her to see how many people were in it. From the noise she guessed it to be crowded. The seat towards which her two escorts gestured her was centred in the dock to micrometer exactness and appeared heavily padded until she sat down. The leather didn’t give, remaining rock hard and Jennifer accepted it was going to be an uncomfortable experience physically as well as in a lot of other respects.